Pigford: Who Knew?

National Review has been all over the Pigford affair since the beginning.  Here is the deal, if you are not familiar with it, by the great Charles C. W. Cooke – Pigford: Let’s Kill All The Lawyers

Our hero is Al Pires, the first of many sharks to take to the Pigford water. As this underwatched 60 Minutes clip shows, as early as the early 1990s, Pires was wandering around the South picking up litigants for a class-action suit against the Department of Agriculture. Unfortunately Pires’s hard work yielded him only 400 or so people with credible stories. Sure, many of these people had actually been discriminated against. But, really, who cares? Even at a potential return of a quarter million per plaintiff, his cadre just didn’t promise enough of a return on investment. So, hiding behind generic claims of “discrimination” by the Department of Agriculture (USDA), the enterprising Pires set about inventing a whole new class of eligible people and tying the original case to a wider cause. Calling America the “biggest racist the world has ever seen,” he justified the vague system that he had created on the grounds that it would facilitate “mini-reparations.” Are you actually a farmer? Doesn’t really matter! Come one come all, for there’s money to be made. Thus the victims became mere tools.

Excuse me for jumping to the chase, but the result of this bureaucratic and judicial monstrosity is to pour money into the pockets of almost anybody who asked for it.  To the tune of $50,000 per claim.  Who qualifies?  Someone like me, who has a long vowel at the end of his name and could be confused with being Hispanic (I am Italian, but my name originated in Spain).  My wife could qualify too, off of her chromosome structure.

Follow Steve @AustrianAnarchy or view his Austrian Anarchy blog.  His work-in-progress, “The Anarchist’s Soufflé Book“, should be done any year now.